Happy Mother's Day ... I'm Sad

Photo by Michele Zipp My core family unitMother's Day used to be all about my mom. I'd call her with some ideas on how we can spend the day and ask her what she wanted to do.

This year, my first Mother's Day as a mom, my husband is asking me what I want to do. Makes sense. This day is also about me now.

And this made me sad.

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Sad in a strange way because I'm blessed to have twins and before I was pregnant, I wanted to be a mom so bad I probably could've made myself lactate.

But me becoming a mom is the breakdown of my original core family unit. The unit that was once just me, mom, dad, and sis, along with tail-finned and furry pets with names like Pookie, Putty, Meiji, Bootsie, and Brad-waa. I have my own core family unit now -- me, hubs, our twins -- Penelope and Hunter -- and two furries we call Lil Louie Monster and Mr. Puffins.

And I'm sad because while I'm deliriously happy to have two babies who will someday talk and maybe even mutter mama as their first word (fingers crossed), it all makes me think that life is going by way too fast, and I want to freeze-frame it right now and have a day that will actually be like two years long where I can really do all the things I want to do with my mom before we all get too old and end up wiping the drool off each other's mouth instead of the baby's.

Becoming a mom makes me understand how grandmothers feel when they earn the title of grandma. Thrilled to have grandbabies, but not so thrilled with the threat of nursing homes. It's that same sense of mortality that I felt in the early days of becoming a mom. That tick tock tick tock TICK TOCK of time passing by. And I thought my biological clock was loud!

I think about this way too much -- I overanalyze and it's usually during those beautiful moments when I'm nursing my twins and thinking, Oh how beautiful are these two beings and I created them ... and then wham! I imagine myself getting old and dying and picture myself 20 years from now thinking, Hey how did that happen, they were just 5 months old!

It hurts too much and makes my heart race, so I snap back to reality and try to live in the now, not in a wirey and gray-haired future. But then I think, Hope, that maybe there will be a pill I could take to keep me young and alive, and hey, maybe one of the twins will invent it because they love me that much they want me around so I can see their grandkids and become a youthful grandma and perky great-grandmother. And we can give that pill to my mom, too, so she can always be around and we'll have a big core family unit always and forever.

But maybe, and I think probably, realistically, that's one of the beauties of having kids. Me living on. Not me in this body, but a part of me will live on in my children, and then in their children, and on and on. Just like I'm a part of my mother. What she taught me lives in me and I'll teach the same values to my children, so we both live on in them. And they'll do the same with their kids.

So I guess I don't need a pill to live forever. My babies are the pill. I'll live on in the most magical way. It's what they've taught me so far in the five short months they've been around. I have so much more to learn from them and hopefully many, many more years to take it all in.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms -- the ones still with us and the ones who have passed on, leaving incredible memories. Happy Mother's Day to my grandma, my nana, my aunt Tena who was like a mom to me -- I miss you, but I'm living with all you taught me.